[In the following essay, Haberstroh maintains that Redburn was written as a haven from his precarious emotional state following the publication of Mardi.]

Redburn was written in part to help Melville avoid the bankruptcy toward which he was heading in 1849. After the financially disastrous “‘fogs’ of Mardi,”¹ Melville needed to write novels that would have a broader popular appeal. A realistic treatment of the merchant service could (and did) re-establish Melville's credit. But Redburn is probably as much the end product of a suicidal crisis as of economic necessity; in his fourth novel, Melville took a very important step away from the destructive emotional state he was evidently in during the last stages of composing Mardi.

As Norman Tabachnik has pointed out, Melville's writing in general shows “a mood of depression and affects equivalent to those found in a suicidal state; expressions of death-like wishes abound in his creative work.”² One reason for this was that Melville's writing was inevitably committed to playing out a continual pattern of quest and failure. Melville knew, long before he ever wrote his first novel, that no voyagers, be they sailors or lubbers, ever find a better life than the one they start off with. Yet Melville kept sending people like Tommo out on journeys he had already decided could only lead to death (as in the case of Ahab) or to some inconclusive standoff with life (as in the case of Ishmael or Israel Potter). Melville obsessively repeated the pattern of quest and frustration partly to fend off emotional collapse—if he were to give over to pure pessimism, he was dead. Partly, too, it was a matter of discipline, as it was later to be with Hemingway: if one cannot achieve the life one wants, as Melville never could, he must then train himself to accept failure by continually facing failure in his creations. This pattern of artistic impulse, of course, sets up unresolvable tensions which inevitably reach crisis proportions, where it seems better to the individual that he be annihilated than go on with the frustrating job of fighting an elaborate psychic holding action.

Readers of Melville are certainly familiar with Hawthorne's version of Melville's visit with him in Liverpool late in 1856, when Melville had commented that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”³ and Hawthorne had correctly guessed that “still [Melville] does not seem to rest in that anticipation.”⁴ Melville's problem for most of his life, of course, was that he could never rest in the anticipation of anything, and so, often vibrated between thoughts of extinction and a desire to survive life's pressures no matter what. This tension is evident in two letters from 1862, the first in May to his brother, Tom, and the second to Sam Shaw in December, a month after Melville broke his shoulder blade in a wagon accident.

Damn your wideawake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it too. Think of those sociable and sensible millions of good fellows all taking a good long friendly snooze together, under the sod—no quarrels, no imaginary envies, no heartburnings, & thinking how much better that other chap is off—none of this. …⁵

I once, like other spoonies, cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long. But I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable objections to a respectable longevity. I dont [sic] like the idea of being left out night after night in a cold churchyard.⁶

The tone of both letters is gently humorous, but the alternation of emotion they express was a deeply divisive force in Melville's personality, especially in the decade between 1847 and 1857. And while he often fought against the “loose sort of notion” of his own annihilation, he always would wind up back in the dumps, usually as the result of a crisis of expectations—the feeling that his accomplishments fell too far short of his hopes.

The last part of Mardi reflects a major crisis of this sort in Melville's feelings. It has long been evident that there are suggestions of suicidal intent in Taji's mind at the novel's conclusion: he rejects all worldly consolation for the loss of Yillah, and desires to pass beyond the reef line between life and death, seeking some satisfaction in the dim notion of possible fulfillment in an afterlife. Taji, to whom Melville quite obviously gives the allegiance of his own emotions, has been disappointed in his quest; he confronts the disappointment not with the balanced resignation which Babbalanja and Media try to urge on him, but rather by plunging into more and more profound states of withdrawal. The consciously destructive pursuit of his obsession becomes, in his eyes, a positive value; he sees self-immolation as a form of catharsis. This is why Melville seems almost buried in despair during the final sections of Mardi.

Melville's response to suicidal urgings in Mardi, however, was to write Redburn rather than dwell on death or despair.

… Not all suicidal states result in suicide or even suicide attempts. This suggests that the thought of suicide has meanings other than being a precursor to the act of suicide. One meaning may be an attempt to say, “I am tired of life or some aspects of it as I presently experience it—I want to leave what I now have.” In certain creative people, there may be an accompanying theme—“I will develop something new in my life, a new life style, new insight, or project which will replace the old or be added to it. This will make my life more tolerable and meaningful.”⁷

In Redburn, after the heavy emotional charge of its predecessor, Melville turned to scenes related to his own first voyage in 1839 and devoted himself to a story whose context was the rather ordinary life of the merchant seaman. Melville could, therefore, begin to come to grips with his ever-present feelings of frustration in the emotionally manageable context of his earliest ocean-going experiences, rather than lose himself in the fantastic crucible of the Mardian archipelago. Melville was able to temporarily “devise a new method for himself”⁸ and so work out a balanced perspective toward the emotional pressures that had disrupted his life since childhood.

These pressures, however, have little to do with Melville's “inability to receive the warm love and acceptance which he desired from his mother,”⁹ as Tabachnik feels. Tabachnik is only restating a fairly common thesis that Melville's emotional problems can be traced to early, unresolved Oedipal conflicts with his father, and to the supposed coldness of his mother toward himself. But the prevailing psychological patterns in Melville's fiction do not show Melville's search for motherly love; they show, rather, Melville's almost bottomless sadness over being cut adrift from his father. The poisoned spring in Melville's life was the premature loss of Allan Melvill and the secure life he had provided for his family during Herman's early years. Unfortunately, there have been no detailed analyses of Redburn as a complex and unified discussion of the psychological response to the loss of a father. The commentary on the novel has always discussed the growth of Redburn's opinions in the broad context of the Melville-sailor-as-Ishmael. The treatments are incomplete in their psychological detail because the commentators are much more interested in Redburn as a readily available focus for putting the rest of the canon in moral perspective rather than as an unfailingly careful probe of a young man's emotional life at a time when he has been cut off from its essential sources of nourishment (for example, Harry Bolton, structurally one of the most important people in the book, is often treated as being an afterthought on Melville's part, an unnecessary intrusion). Redburn is certainly not the potboiler Melville considered it to be; nor is it only a moral cautionary tale. It is a watershed in Melville's emotional life.

The basic pattern of that life was formed principally in the years 1830 to 1839. Between 1830 and 1832, Allan Melvill went bankrupt and then died just as it seemed he might be beginning to recoup his losses. Finally, after seven more years of sharply varying family fortunes, Herman was forced to go to sea for his livelihood. He never stopped yearning, however, for the idyllic childhood years before his father's death. This fact is evident from a regularly recurring situation in the fiction: a traveler seeks—often, indeed, possesses and then loses—some place of tranquil security. It may be Typee Valley, Odo, the maintop of the Neversink, the idealized Liverpool of Redburn's guidebook, or Saddle Meadows. But Melville's protagonists, fictional versions of himself, are always frustrated by their inability to hold on to those fictional projections of what Melville lost early in life—a safe shelter against the buffetings about of a merciless world. And in losing their places of safety, Melville's personae often lose some figure serving in the stead of the dead Allan Melvill. For example, the essence of Tommo's disappointment with Typee Valley is that in an ideal world presided over by an ideal father (Mehevi), he must inevitably remain an outsider; and in White-Jacket, a great deal of the emotion surrounding White-Jacket's near-flogging comes from the flogging's disruption of the peaceful and familial cameraderie of the maintop under the benevolent partriarchy of Jack Chase. At any moment, White-Jacket can be separated from his high-flying fellows and dragged down to the deck. For Melville, fragmentation was the law of life, and it was one's attitude toward that fact which determined the direction one's own life would take.

In writing fiction, Melville was testing, shaping, and ultimately controlling his attitudes toward fragmentation. Melville knew that the frustration with life so constant in his personality needed to be held in check—unless the beast could be brought to hand, it would be a recurring source of rage and misanthropy, emotions that Melville found quite painfully exhausting. When Sarah Morewood commented to Melville, in 1851, about the rigors of his reclusive life at Arrowhead and told him that some of his city friends thought him insane, Melville told her that “if he left home to look after Hungary the cause in hungery [sic] would suffer.”¹⁰ In other words, if he left his writing to “look after” his sanity, he might in fact lose it. It was his writing, after all, that allowed him to objectify and dramatize his feelings, and so better control them. Writing Redburn the way he did, then, must have made Melville better able himself to endure whatever unpleasant feelings he still had as a result of his memory of Allan Melvill's bankruptcy and death, and of his own fall from an insulated, aristocratic position in life. Melville, as the novel's ultimate manipulator, controls the elements of the book so that it is possible for his young sailor to weather the emotional task of putting his father and his past behind him, which, in turn, allows him to survive healthily intact. Through the design of the book, Melville affirms for himself that one need not be painfully fettered to the past if one can only learn to be less hurt by life's losses. If Melville had not been able to disentangle himself for a time from the chaotic impulses that produced Mardi, he would not have had the breathing space that resulted finally in Moby-Dick. He probably would have gone directly into the abrasive frenzy of Pierre or the calculated emptiness of The Confidence-Man.

The most crucial elements in Redburn's early life were his cosmopolitan father, Walter Redburn, and the comfortable, genteel style of life his father provided the family with. Once the seemingly perpetual stability of this life had been shattered by the violence of Walter Redburn's bankruptcy and death, his son found himself at loose ends. Finally, in order to try to restore some sense of continuity and purpose to his life, Redburn ships out to Europe where he hopes to regain a sense of closeness to his lost father and to his own past feelings toward him by visiting places his father had visited during several trips to England and the continent. It seems unnecessary here to elaborately plow again the already too-furrowed critical ground of Redburn's relation to his guidebook; but one notion needs to be emphasized: Redburn's early residence in New York City was a time of security and status. Life was quiet; the picture of the world outside was romantically colored by his father's portfolios and objets d'art. The cosmopolitan nature of the assembled home furnishings (down to the actual French servant) inevitably breathed to Redburn that he was a gentleman's son. One of the favorite memories of this gentleman's son was a fort on the Narrows that he once visited with his uncle and father.

It was a beautiful place, as I remembered it, and very wonderful and romantic, too, as it appeared to me. … On the side away from the water was a green grove … in a sort of twilight you came to an arch in the wall of the fort, dark as night; and going in, you groped about in long vaults, twisting and turning on every side, till at last you caught a peep of green grass and sunlight, and all at once came out in an open space in the middle of the castle. And there you would see cows quietly grazing, or ruminating under the shade of young trees, and perhaps a calf frisking about, and trying to catch its own tail; and sheep clambering among the mossy ruins. … Yes, the fort was a beautiful, quiet, charming spot. I should like to build a little cottage in the middle of it, and live there all my life. It was noon-day when I was there, in the month of June, and there was little wind to stir the trees, and everything looked as if it was waiting for something, and the sky overhead was blue as my mother's eye, and I was so glad and happy then. But I must not think of those delightful days, … something rises up in my throat and almost strangles me.

(pp. 35-36)¹¹

Walter Redburn's portfolios, with their idealized European landscapes, seemed always to promise the same serenity. And so, when Redburn looks out to sea in Chapter 7, he imagines “towns and villages and green fields and hedges and farm-yards and orchards, away over that blank of sea” (p. 34). In fact, as Redburn looks out over the Atlantic, he takes little notice of the sea's vastness or emptiness. In this, he shows the distance between his own youthfully naive expectations and the darker knowledge of life's emptiness possessed by someone like Ahab, for whom the vacant sea is an all-pervasive symbol of the vacuum in which human existence is suspended. The sea is not a dark emotional or metaphysical reality for Redburn. Though he feels “blasted” as he sets out on his journey (p. 11), he has somehow preserved a faith that his life can run again in the emotional channels of his boyhood. It is evident that what Redburn seeks from shipping out is very much like what he conceives he is leaving behind. The image of the fort—with its serenity and safety—embodies Redburn's sense of his own boyhood. He would, obviously, give anything to return to it. It is understandable that his mind, in musing about England, fixes itself primarily on images of quiet pastoralism, images that reflect his experience of the fort and his hope that England may somehow be like that June day on the Narrows.

Considered in the contexts of status and security, it is easy enough to see what the attractions of the guidebook are for Redburn. The quality of the scenes the guidebook predicts a traveler will find is very much like the quality of the pictures in Walter Redburn's portfolios. The Picture of Liverpool presents to its readers visions of the city which combine grandeur with pastoral romance. A poem by a certain Dr. Aiken tells the traveler of the humble fisherfolk who founded Liverpool, “their nets and little boats their only store” (p. 147). The city now, of course, is a commercial giant, but Dr. Aiken's verse tries to imply that, at base, it has never lost its idyllic character. A little later on, there is another poem, this time by a “neglected Liverpool poet” (p. 147), a work directed at “‘the cultivated reader; especially as this noble epic [it tells of Liverpool's dominance in trade] is written with great felicity of expression and the sweetest delicacy of feeling’” (p. 147). Redburn is more than ready to relate emotionally to both the poem's supposed audience and to its sense of the quality of Liverpool life. First of all, Redburn certainly always considered himself “cultivated”; in fact, his difficulty in initially coping with his fellow sailors was in good part the result of his sense of his own superior breeding. Secondly, Redburn welcomes the comfortably vague romanticism of the epic poetry as an anodyne to the harsh realities of sailing before the mast. After the coldness of Captain Riga, the sternness of the officers, the coarseness of the crew, and the general hardship of an ocean voyage, the guidebook poetry is a happy reinforcement of Redburn's image of himself and of those expectations about life abroad that the milieu of his father's house first established for him. This is the principal reason why the impression made on Wellingborough by the anonymous poem is that it is “composed in the old stately style, and rolls along commanding as a coach and four” (p. 147). He associates the poetry with an image of upper class life, the coach. It is an inevitable association for him, encouraged by both the guidebook and by his sense of his own childhood, where romantic expectations were nourished by the status of his father. At the end of a long, discouraging journey, then, the guidebook seems a proof and a promise that the lost world of his childhood feelings is still open to him if he simply puts his trust in the validity of The Picture of Liverpool. No wonder Redburn is so enthusiastic—almost religiously so—over the book.

Unhappily, Redburn keeps running into dead ends when he tries to use the guidebook. He wants to follow his father's footsteps through the city but cannot even locate Riddough's hotel, where his father once stayed. It was from Riddough's that Walter Redburn launched his own excursion into the town years before, a tour that was a quintessential expression of the secure life-style which he enjoyed and which he would have passed on to his son. The flyleaves of the guidebook show Walter Redburn's notations: money for cigars, dinners at the best restaurants, meetings with some of the most prominent people in the city, trips to the theatre, purchases of books, etc. For Redburn to, literally, walk in his father's footsteps would enable him to be in touch with the lost ambiance of that life-style. Riddough's Hotel is the gate to the past, and so, is the place Redburn naturally sees as the real start of his journey after his father.

When he gets to the alleged site of the hotel, he finds it has been demolished, a disappointment that brings into sharp focus the guidebook's limitations. It cannot reflect a number of specific—and, for Redburn—emotionally crucial changes in the Liverpool landscape since Walter Redburn's time; and it never did reflect accurately the general quality of life in the city. Redburn, of course, cannot just throw his father's book away; he has invested too much in it emotionally to ever do that. It would seem almost like a rejection (even a damnation) of his father himself and of the life his father represented. So, Redburn tries to minimize his sense of disappointment; his solution is an attempt to hold a middle ground from which to deal with his feelings: he keeps the book, but follows his own instincts in exploring the city and its environs. This solution enables him to maintain a sense of reverence for the past, and so preserve that area of his mental life inviolable, while it also allows him to meet the present as it actually exists.

Redburn sets off on his own, and in the city he sees only death and beggary. Liverpool is not the aesthetic or social venture the guidebook would have had him believe; it is an obviously brutal economic enterprise. Likewise, in the countryside around Liverpool he is confronted by “forbidden green fields” (p. 213) which hide “man-traps and spring-guns” (p. 210)—certainly not the peaceful rural landscapes he used to admire in his father's portfolios. Redburn, in these chapters as in the guidebook chapters, stands, psychologically disenfranchised, outside his youth, with no way to step back inside. This is best portrayed when his rambles bring him to a rural cottage, the only time he is able to find any English equivalent of the idyllic fort on the Narrows: “So sweet a place I had never seen: … there were flowers in the garden; and six red cheeks [the owner's three daughters], like six moss roses, hanging from the casement. At the embowered door-way, sat an old man, confidentially communing with his pipe: while a little child, sprawling on the ground, was playing with his shoe-strings” (p. 213). Here is a father, not bankrupt, living out a comfortable old age in the midst of a pastoral setting, with a child who has nothing to worry about except enjoying the tranquility of his surroundings. The scene is an embodiment of Redburn's fondest dreams for himself and for his own family. But while Redburn is invited into the cottage to eat, it is clear to him that he is only regarded as a transient, and is not expected to stay or to try to cultivate the affections of the daughter he particularly has his eye on. Redburn cannot have the eternally quiet home in the pastoral landscape, or the love of the girl as innocent as the setting she reflects. And when he goes back to Liverpool, plodding his “solitary way to the same old docks” (p. 215), his despondency shows that though he appeared to have successfully reconciled himself to the loss of his past, at the deepest level of his personality he was still hoping that he could find something somewhere in England that would satisfy the emotional needs he left America with. That satisfaction, now, seems irrevocably beyond him; and he is left once again, as he was when his father died, facing a vacuum.

Into this vacuum drops Harry Bolton, the embodiment of everything Redburn believed England at its best would be. Indeed, Harry seems to Redburn a figure right out of the sort of pastoral, aristocratic environment he has been seeking proximity to all along. In Chapter 44, for example, Redburn creates a private fantasy in which he portrays to himself Harry's imagined departure from his ancestral home in Bury St. Edmunds.

In vain did Bury, with all its fine old monastic attractions, lure him to abide on the beautiful banks of her Larke, and under the shadow of the stately and storied old Saxon tower.

By my rare old historic associations, breathed Bury. … Where will you find shadier walks than under my lime-trees? Where lovelier gardens than those within the old walls of my monastery, approached through the lordly Gate? … For here, on Angel-Hill, are my coffee and card-rooms, and billiard saloons, where you may lounge away your mornings, and empty your glass and your purse as you list.

(p. 217)

Granted that Harry has told Redburn quite romantic things about his supposed family background and social connections, Redburn's fantasy is still his own. Its elements are predictable, and it is as much a projection of what Redburn needs Harry to be as it is the result of the stories Harry tells. Redburn imagines Harry's natural milieu to be one of pastoral gentility, financial security, and inherited status. Harry, because of his aristocratic ways, becomes a surrogate for Walter Redburn, and so provides for Wellingborough a continuity of association with those parts of his past most precious to him. Redburn is prepared to share in Harry's life as he was prepared to share, through the guidebook, in his father's life.

Harry, unfortunately, betrays Wellingborough much the way the guidebook did. Harry whisks Redburn off to London, promising to show him the delights of the town. In fact, he only leaves him alone all night in the antechamber of a gambling house. To Redburn, the room is a composite of all the dread and evil man can know; he finds himself “alive to a dreadful feeling … never before felt, except when penetrating into the lowest and most squalid haunts of sailor iniquity in Liverpool” (p. 234). And when Harry returns periodically to the antechamber, he is not the smoothly cosmopolitan individual Redburn was first attracted to; rather, he is disturbingly frantic and disoriented. Later, aboard ship on the way home, Harry is no more dependable or stable than he showed himself to be in London. Though just an ordinary seaman, he dresses foppishly and will not carry out orders. He provides Redburn with a perfect object lesson in the self-destructiveness of trying to persist in attitudes that no longer have any relation to one's circumstances. Redburn can see quite graphically the results of clinging to the past.

It is interesting, however, that rather than recoil away from Harry because of his deception in London or his blindness to the necessities of his new life at sea, Redburn takes him under his wing and tries to protect him on the homeward voyage, and even after the ship makes port. This might be a demonstration of Redburn's growing capacity for pity; but Redburn also does what he does so that he will not have to completely turn his back on his feeling about his past. Even though Harry, like the guidebook, represents a romantic attitude toward life which Redburn comes to see is impractical and unreliable, Harry is too deeply associated with Redburn's memories of his father and lost glories to be abruptly shoved aside. After all, Harry became what Walter Redburn had become—a bankrupt aristocrat. For Redburn to reject Harry would mean, perhaps, condemning his own father for the same falling-off, and even introducing the possibility that Walter Redburn lost his money because of some moral flaw in his character (Harry, of course, seems morally flawed, though this is kept vague). This sort of speculation about his father is too fearful a moral chasm for Redburn to face, and so his mind never raises the question. Perhaps Melville, too, did not want to raise the question, because the answer would bear directly on Allan Melvill, the original for both Walter Redburn and Harry Bolton. In fact, no one will ever know what suspicions about his father Melville might have been fighting to repress in 1849; he had watched his father, seventeen years earlier, die, raving, in an upstairs room of the house, and had been raised in a religious system which believed that trials and tribulations of the very sort his father was undergoing were inevitably the punishment for moral lapses¹² (it was, of course, not until Pierre that Melville broached the problem of alleged paternal sins directly). And so, Melville has Redburn deal with Harry much as he dealt with the guidebook and, by extension, Redburn's memory of his father. When they arrive back in New York, Redburn turns Harry over to a friend for safe-keeping. This allows Redburn to carry Harry in his memory—to protect the old feelings—but avoid the practical consequences of Harry's presence. Redburn puts Harry aside gently and humanely; he tries to find some occupation for him that will be more suitable to his talents and physique than sailing before the mast. Redburn is not throwing Harry to the wolves. He is trying to engineer a situation that will have happy consequences for both himself and his companion. It is a sign of Redburn's maturity that he acts as he does. It is also a sign that, after a number of false starts, he may be significantly stabilizing his attitudes toward his own past and the loss of his father.

The possibly lethal effects of not stabilizing one's attitudes toward life are clearly demonstrated in Harry's final end and in the end of the bitterly spiteful Jackson. Harry, unable to find a suitable new life for himself on shore, ships out on other voyages, even though he is totally ineffectual as a sailor. At the conclusion of the novel, the mature Redburn tells the reader that Harry died on a whaling cruise. One cannot help but feel the implication here that Harry deliberately adopted a suicidal pattern of behavior, and that his plunging himself into another voyage reflects the same sort of self-destructive desperation he showed in the gambling house. Redburn, to a greater or lesser extent, had always felt this element of desperateness in Harry's character; and when, after arriving back home, he first gets word from his friend Goodwell that Harry has disappeared from sight in New York, Redburn “glanced over the papers to see if there were any accounts of suicides, or drowned persons floating in the harbor of New York” (p. 300).

Jackson, too, is a man on whom life has inflicted permanent wounds. Whatever his past has been, whatever terrors it released to gnaw at his heart, Jackson has never been able to accommodate them, and has only become more and more inward, more and more bone-chillingly misanthropic. Like Taji, he has developed a Satanic laugh; and when he falls from the yard to his death, it is the result of his throwing himself into the teeth of the elements in a gesture of self-immolating defiance. Jackson seemed always only capable of hatred (perhaps, sick of his hate), but unable to take his life himself, he leaped to a situation where Nature would do it for him. At the same time, he had the satisfaction of seeming to defy Nature, the force which he may have blamed for his many woes (as Ahab does).

Redburn, on the other hand, has freed himself of the chaos of Harry's and Jackson's lives. Both men are models of the suicidal personality, of the dangers of the beast: frustration. They are both examples of where the young Redburn, blasted and alone, could have wound up. But Redburn pities Harry and fears Jackson, showing his terror and disappointment at self-destruction as an alternative to living with fragmentation. Later, in Ahab and Pierre, Melville would again be attracted to men who lived lives of desperate, and often foolish heroics. In 1849, however, he for a time made successful use of his fiction to quiet his rage, to tell himself that endurance and control were still possible.

Notes

1. Letter from Elizabeth Shaw Melville (April 30, 1849). Quoted in Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 61.

2. Norman Tabachnik, “Creative Suicidal Crises,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 29 (1973), 259.

3. Metcalf, p. 161.

4. Metcalf, p. 161.

5. Metcalf, pp. 197-98.

6. Metcalf, p. 200.

7. Tabachnik, p. 258.

8. Tabachnik, p. 258.

9. Tabachnik, p. 259.

10. Metcalf, p. 133.

11. This and all future references to the text will be to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Redburn (Chicago, 1969).

12. Cf. William Braswell, Melville's Religious Thought (New York, 1959), pp. 4-7; and William Gilman, Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York, 1951), pp. 21-26, 69, 79-81.